Comment by whytevuhuni
3 months ago
> I think an improved C can be memory safe even without GC
That's a very interesting belief. Do you see a way to achieve temporal memory safety without a GC, and I assume also without lifetimes?
3 months ago
> I think an improved C can be memory safe even without GC
That's a very interesting belief. Do you see a way to achieve temporal memory safety without a GC, and I assume also without lifetimes?
A simple pointer ownership model can achieve temporal memory safety, but I think to be convenient to use we may need lifetimes. I see no reason this could not be added to C.
A C with lifetimes would be nice, I agree.
Would be awesome if someone did a study to see if it's actually achievable... Cyclone's approach was certainly not enough, and I think some sort of generics or a Hindley-Milner type system might be required to get it to work, otherwise lifetimes would become completely unusable.
Yes, one needs polymorphism. Let's see. I have some ideas.
C does have the concept of lifetimes. There is just no syntax to specify it, so it is generally described along all the other semantic details of the API. And no it is not the same as for Rust, which causes clashes with the Rust people.
What clashes?
I think there was a discussion in the Linux kernel between a kernel maintainer and the Rust people, which started by the Rust people demanding formal semantics, so that they could encode it in Rust, and the subsystem maintainer unwilling to do that.
5 replies →